Software Design using Analogy and WordNet

Software design is a complex cognitive task. Given the lack of consistent and general methodologies, it often demands creative capacities that sometimes bring our insight closer to arts than to an engineering field. Much of the success obtained by software engineers in their designs, comes from their acquired know-how. One way to improve their work, is by providing CASE tools capable of assisting the software design task in two significant ways: storing past designs, and providing cognitive support for design space exploration. In this paper, we focus on the second aspect, presenting an approach to software design using analogy. We also describe how analogical reasoning can be combined with a general ontology – WordNet. This ontology provides object classification, and a conceptual network, in which we base our similarity mappings. An experimental study of the analogy-WordNet combination is also presented in this paper.